Dr. Gerald (Gerry) Moore was an English polymath. Before turning to medicine, he had enjoyed a promising career as a teenage actor, appearing in films with Petula Clark, Thora Hird and Irene Handl. After acting, he became an oral surgeon, with well-known people as patients. In the mid-1960s, he co-founded the Cavendish Bio Medical Centre. He was a published poet, novelist and an author of children’s books. He was the owner of Heathfield Park, a large safari park, riding school and motor museum in Sussex. After Dr. Moore's first wife Irene died in 1992, the holdings of Heathfield Park were sold by Sotheby's in 1993, but not this sculpture. Dr. Moore retired to Devon and brought this one along.
Along the way, Dr. Moore was also a prolific painter and sculptor. Dr. Moore's artistic sensibility was shaped by trips to France and Italy in the late 1940s and by 1950 he had exhibited and sold his first painting. His paintings were exhibited at the Scottish National Gallery in 1959 and, jointly with David Hockney's works, at Heal's Gallery in London in 1961. Dr. Moore's deconstructed figurative style, which often included elements of the absurd, was self-described as "expressive experimentalism".
The sculpture was sold after his death by Summers Place Auction on May 18, 2021 as Lot 100. Acquired from Barbara Israel Garden Antiques.
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